Is there a wardrobe that leads to Publicatiania? (a tornado to The Agenterald City? pixie dust to Never Rejection Land?)
my uncle (left) and my dad (right) at Disney World
“I remember you dated a woman who lived there,” I said. My dad was driving us past Orchid Springs a maze of condos behind cypress trees and Spanish moss. “She was from England.”
“It was one date,” my dad said.
I sat in the backseat with my child and husband. I wanted to say, “But her name was Beverly and I was five. She had candy in red wrappers on the piano in her condo, she held my arms and spun me around in our yard, we took her to the train station to say goodbye and I cried all the way home.” I wanted to say, “I wanted you to marry her. She had a British accent.”
“Oh,” is what I said. I remembered her short blonde hair and the feeling of air between me and the ground when she spun me over the grass. It was a long time before my dad introduced me to another girlfriend. There is still this child that thinks–if you’d married her, Dad, we could’ve gone to England. ENGLAND! Narnia and Middle-Earth! The Hundred Acre Woods and Never Never Land! And through the looking-glass and up in castle towers with spinning wheels or dancing shoes and we never would’ve met your second wife…
One date? Am I to believe that?
I write, edit, write, and edit. I research agents. I read about query letters, about the publishing industry, about new books published. I listen to interviews with authors. And still I think PUBLICATION! As if everything magical is there. If I’d just written a different novel or queried different agents, I wouldn’t be so crazy.
When a hurricane threatened our home (way back when I was five or six), I used to put all my toys in my sleeping bag and crawl inside with them. This way if I got carried to Oz, I wouldn’t need to come back. I’d be ready to stay, because what idiot comes back?
But sometimes you have to admit that knocking on the back of every closet you meet isn’t going to open to a door to a secret world. The odds of getting an agent to open the door to the world of publishing may be slightly better, but the results will probably be less dramatic.
What did my dad think when his only child kissed him goodbye and said, “If I get there, I’m not coming back.”
Do you have unrealistic ideas about publication? What do you imagine publication will do for you? What do you hope for? How crazy a dream is it?
Girls don’t start fires, do they?
dad reads me a story
Tonight I listened to people talk about fire–an escape from fire, an attempted suicide by fire, art made with fire. A few weeks ago, my mother-in-law’s church was set on fire. I learned that over 80% of arsonists are men and that most kids who play with fire are boys.
In the eighth grade I would stick crayons and pencils into the space heater to watch them melt or scar. I hid them in a metal box in my sock drawer. That was when I lived with my mother. When I lived with my father I placed crayons and paper in a pitcher and set them on fire in my room. The pitcher was plastic. A hole opened up on the side. Flames shot out. I rushed to the bathroom and threw it in the tub. Then I had to clean the mess up before my dad got home. I buried the pitcher in the field next door at ten o-clock at night. I was in the ninth grade. Sometime later my dad asked me if I had seen the yellow pitcher. “No,” I said. “Not for a while.”
I was in the tenth grade living with my dad when I started my period. Until I got the courage to tell my dad I would empty the carton the tampons came in and burn the box in the fireplace. I’d then sweep up the ashes and dump them into the bottom of the outdoor garbage can. I burned a Cosmopolitan magazine that way too.
When I was very little, we had to burn our trash. I remember peering over the side of the stone wall my dad built around the pit. Bits of paper and sparks flew into the air. Eventually we got trash service and the pit disappeared. A pool is there now.
In 7th grade I knew these sisters whose house had burned down. The younger sister had been home at the time and her skin twisted up from her legs to her face. She was a tough girl. She and her sister got into fights more days than they didn’t.
Did Kafka want his manuscripts burned when he died? Or was that Nabokov? How many writers condemn words to the flame? I burned all the poems I wrote in high school. They did need to be disposed of, but they didn’t deserve the drama.
Have you…would you ever burn your writing? Do you have some secret stash or unfinished work you’d like to know that no one will see after you die? After my mother died, I found a novel she’d been writing. I keep it in a metal box and wonder what to do with it.
Don’t you think you should apologize?
view from my father's dock on a cold day--my favorite place to go and think
“Your friend C. isn’t allowed to come over anymore,” my mom said.
I was in the 7th grade and living with my mom for the first time. And we were living with a couple–a drummer and a graphic designer. I looked up at my mom.
“C. said something inappropriate to S.,” mom said.
I looked around the room as if the explanation of inappropriate would be there.
“She followed him into the kitchen. Remember?” mom asked.
I thought about the afternoon. S. and I were usually here alone together in the apartment before my mom and his girlfriend got home from work. That afternoon I’d brought a friend home with me. C. had gone to the kitchen. “She wanted something to drink,” I said.
“She made a pass at S.”
I understood what she meant and I didn’t. C. hadn’t said anything to me. I thought harder. She had said S. was cute. “Oh,” I said.
“That’s it?” my mom asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. What had C. said? I wanted so much to know. S. was 32. C. was 12.
“S. is very embarrassed. You should apologize to him.”
Later, when S. was home and I mumbled that I was sorry about my friend, S. didn’t look at me. He said not to worry about it. To forget it.
I never learned what C. said in the kitchen when she followed him into the kitchen and I stayed in the living room going over my homework, but I couldn’t stop feeling as if I’d said it.
The next day I ended my friendship with C. I didn’t tell her why.
Much of the time I feel that my fiction is saying something and I don’t know what that is. I brought the story into the world–seems like I ought to understand it better, but I don’t. What does my novel mean? No idea. But it is my fault it is here, so shouldn’t I have so clue?
How well do you understand what you write? Is it all clear to you? Do you leave it to others to figure out? But how then can you explain it to an agent? How do you make it sell?
And I don’t understand why I write something and then feel bad about it.
Dorothy shouldn’t've gone back to Kansas.
the back yard
In the backyard, I sat under the kitchen window behind a hibiscus bush. The hibiscus bush grew up to the gutter along the roof. The space was a cave. One side white scuffed wall, the other side and roof branches, leaves and red flowers, the floor black dusty dirt. Jill, the german shepherd, sat in the dirt with me and I would tell her everything.
I was seven, eight, or nine. Jill died when I was nine. Grandma sold the house when I was 13.
You can’t expect others to take care of your memories and hibiscus flowers don’t contain magical properties.
No one else is going to care about your story as much you. No one is going to care about it in the same way. What is the condition of your novel right now? Well-tended, trimmed, weeded, painted, and bright? Neglected, wild, overgrown, and dark? Is it in the middle of your busy life, on the edge of your thoughts where you go once in a while, or far out past a bridge to nowhere? Oz?
I’m dreaming, right?
at the park
Lots of writing books say not to start with a dream. They say not to end that it was all a dream. They usually say leave dreams out all together. Nobody likes to read about someone else’s dream. Do you think that is true?
On Thursday I told the school director that I wanted to work two days a week instead of four. I want more time to work on finding an agent and making art. It took months to come to this decision. A few months more to act on it. Typically I work from ten at night until one in the morning and get up at six to face everything else.
When do you get to work on your writing? Do you (would you) lose sleep to do so?
The night after I committed to few hours and less regular pay, I dream the roof of my apartment was about to cave in. Layers of ceiling peeled away to reveal an enormous metal box held up by one bolt. If it fell in, it would kill everyone at home. On the other side of the room my husband pulled back a curtain to reveal a window I didn’t know was there. “Did you know this window was there?” he said.
“I’ve got to figure out how to make that metal room come down safely,” I said.
No dream book is needed to work that out, I suppose.
Does your work (your writing/art) show up in your dreams? Which side of the room are you in–the side about to be crushed by a rusted, creaking forgotten upstairs room or the side with the window to see the sky?
500 wrong words
Can you write a 500-word sentence? 500 exactly.
Shelly Lowenkopf mentioned a fellow named Barnaby Conrad and his 500 word sentence. I couldn’t resist the effort.
Janie Hopkins, her curves and wayward hair, waited by the Hamilton train tracks just within sight of the high school where her boyfriend, or the boy she hoped would be her boyfriend, would see her through the window of the science class; he stared out that cracked, dim window everyday to dream about life elsewhere, places he had yet to read about, places perhaps glimpsed on television but which he knew no one else in town had ever imagined, and Janie Lee hoped that he would see her waiting and place her in that dream even if he put her there by accident, simply because she was there and certainly no other girl in town bothered to put herself in his line of view because why would they when he had no prospects of any kind considering his family’s past and no father would allow his daughter to walk through town in front of God and everybody with a Pilketon boy, but Janie was lucky if being fatherless was ever lucky because no one cared what an orphan did because they expected such a girl to lose her way at the first available opportunity, which was just about every day, especially for her and her curves and wayward hair; didn’t everyone know that the more curves in a girl’s body the more chances to go wrong as if curves meant derailment and this was why a train went in a straight line and everything good was flat and everything suspicious bent one way or another, and this was why Janie’s sister would never wait for Merit Pilketon to see her do anything like stand by the train tracks, looking for all the world as if the train would stop just for her and her hand on her hip, but Janie knew that a boy wasn’t his father no matter what folks said about apples falling from trees; in fact, she liked fallen apples best with their bruises and the feeling they weren’t wanted by something so much larger than themselves and in the case of Merit Pilketon, Janie knew he was the best apple of all, perfect to hold as if she were a teacher and fate were giving her an apple to put on her desk, though she wasn’t really sure she could teach fate anything other than to leave her alone, which was an important lesson for fate to know, and here she scuffed the dirt next to the track as if fate itself were the earth under her feet and that’s how it had power over all of them, but she wasn’t about to concede anything to something she could walk on even if the world did grow from it, everything from weeds to apple trees and her very own self; the dirt couldn’t possibly care what boy she wanted or what she wanted from him and what she wanted from this boy was escape, and who better to offer escape than someone who had already fallen.
Please point out my comma errors. (Commas beat me in my sleep.) Hell. Point out all the errors. It is 500 words long! And I wrote it while my students took an iBT TOEFL reading practice test and decided not to edit.
I challenge you to 500 words. See what happens.
Can’t you wait?
with a fellow RA (Resident Assistant)
I listen at the door in an empty dimly lit hall. The couple are easy to hear.
I knock. “R.A.,” I say. I hate this part.
The two of them stumble around as quietly as they can. “What?” the girl says through the closed door.
“It’s the R.A.,” I say. This is my job. No answer. I knock again.
“Just a minute,” she says. She opens the door in a tee shirt and boxers. “What?”
“May I come in?” I ask. She can say no. Her rights are in the student handbook. No one ever reads the student handbook.
Her mouth twists. She opens the door wide and I step in. “What is it?” she asks.
“I heard voices in the hall,” I say. “You know visiting hours ended at 10.”
She rolls her eyes. “So? Did someone complain?”
Her roommate came and got me. The roommate wanted back in her room. “I heard voices in the hall,” I say again.
“It’s just me,” she says. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong room.”
“May I check your closet?’
She can say no to that too, but she shrugs. I open the closet. The guy is squatting in the laundry basket, clothes cover his head. “Get dressed and meet me out in the hall,” I say, looking away.
I tell the girl I’ll have to write her up. “Skinny fucking bitch,” she says.
My pen shakes when I write down her name and room number. I hope she doesn’t notice. “I’ll put that in the write-up,” I say. She makes a face.
“I’ll be in the hall,” I say.
Waiting in the hall, I wonder why they can’t wait until the weekend. The weekend is 24-hour visitation. It is Thursday night. But I don’t have a boyfriend. I’ve never had a boyfriend.
The hallway is deserted, but the other girls are surely listening behind their closed doors. The guy comes out and gives me half a smile. “I need your ID,” I say.
He hands it to me and tells me his name at the same. He’s dressed, but he’s got more clothes rolled up under his arm. He follows me down the hall, and in the elevator we’re alone. I don’t look at him. I write his information down on my scrap of paper. “That it?” he asks.
I give him back his ID and nod. “Will she get in trouble?” he asks.
No guy has ever asked me to break a rule for him. “It just goes in a file,” I say. “The director will talk to her. If nothing else happens, that’s it.”
“You do this often?” he asks.
I lean back against the elevator wall and cross my arms over my chest. “There is 24 hour visitation starting tomorrow.” I don’t look at him, but he kind of laughs.
“Sorry,” he says when the doors open.
“Me too,” I say.
We walk through the lobby to the front doors of the dorm. As far as I know, I never see him again.
My son and I go to the bookstore a lot. He likes to pick out a few books, find an out-of-the-way corner, and have me read to him. Yesterday, we walked past the fiction section and he said, “It’s so pretty.”
I looked at the shelves, the pillar, the window, up the vaulted ceiling. “Yes, it is.” And I can’t decide if I’m jealous or inspired by all the books I see. What if I had a book on one of the shelves? Most of the books that are there I’ll never read. I can’t bring myself to say any of those books are bad because I’ve always hated that sour grape fable and they have managed something I have not.
How do you feel when you read a terrible book? Do you want to quit or try harder?
And one more for good measure…
This is the last chapter of Drowning Karma I’m going to post. If you’re so inclined, chapter three is here. Thank you for reading.
Another chapter…
Chapter Two of Drowning Karma is up at Lake Belle. I shall know go wrestle with my insecurity and other demons.
don’t try this at home
When a cockroach runs across the bathroom floor, do not think you are a gymnast on the parallel bars. The towel rack will come out of the wall, anchors and all, leaving four holes and torn wallpaper. You will hit the ground shoulder first. The stool you sit on while you fix your hair will fall on you. Bits of drywall will fall on you and coat the floor. You will have bruises on your shin, a pulled muscle in your thigh, a terrific bruise on your lower back, a bruise on your elbow, a pulled muscle from your elbow to your shoulder, tiny cuts on your fingers, a bruise on the back of your neck, and pulled muscles in both shoulders. It will hurt every time you turn your head. For about ten minutes you will fell like vomiting. For much longer you will feel like an idiot.
Amazing the power of a 2 1/2 inch cockroach.
When I let people read my work, I have moments of panic. A desire to escape as if there is some trick to escaping myself. But usually the long list of excuses for why everything is still not right just leads to looking more foolish. I’m tired and in pain and wondering why I can’t pull off the published author trick. Hey, I’m not a gymnast.
Lately the why-aren’t-you-published question is akin to the why-are-you-in-pain question. The cockroach answer is as embarrassing, but more people understand it.
If publication is a goal, what holds you back?
You could say that publication isn’t necessary. You could also say I should’ve just mushed the cockroach. But I don’t actually believe either of those statements.
